Ashley Anderson:
CLASS OF 1991
Natrona County High SchoolClass of 1991
Casper, WY
Kelly Walsh High SchoolClass of 1991
Casper, WY
Ashley's Story
Life
I recently moved to Oregon with my husband and 3 kids (Sons Jake 11 and Jesse 6, daughter Cameron 9). I'm a chemical engineer and I work in the semiconductor industry. All in all, life is pretty good. The kids, work, house, pets, ect. keep me incredibly busy but I still manage to find time to keep up with my hobbies - mostly exercising at the gym (hooray even after 3 kids I haven't turned into a fat cow!), doing stained glass, scrapbooking and reading. My main goal in life is to win the lottery and retire into obscurity. We visit Casper about once a year - usually in July - to visit family and friends. Everytime I visit home, yeah I still consider Casper home, I never want to leave. I'd love to hear from any old friends that I've lost touch with - email usually works best.
School
Oh the little bio thingy offers suggestions of stuff to put in this part. One of the questions is who was your biggets crush. Ha - I'd rather not answer who my biggest crush was on account of the fact that:
1. I never told him
2. I'm sure he figured it out but regarded me as that crazy girl making goo-goo eyes at him all the time.
3. he only spoke directly to me once in the entire 3 years we went to school.
Another one of the questions is which teachers inspired you. I wasn't really inspired by any of my teachers. I think I kind of floated through high school waiting to be old enough to go to college. For me it was more social than academic. Sometimes I think back to my high school days and wish I could do it all over again. Maybe I wouldn't have been shy and maybe I would have learned to study (didn't figure out how to study until I got to college). My life now is pretty great, but if I had it to do all over again I probably would have lived my life between then and now a little differently. I never let myself get too wild and I have too many responsibilities to do it now - I'm probably headed for a mid-life crisis somewhere down the line, only kidding.
College
I studied engineering which pretty much means I did math for 14 hours straight everyday - ugh, I know stuff about quantum mechanics too. Wasn't into the partying scene. Wow I sound like a nerd. awh well, in the end it all paid off. I got my diploma - 2 of them actually, Chemistry and Chemical Engineering. I met my husband, a mechanical engineer who also enjoys doing math for 14 hours a day and can talk at length about nerdy things like finite element analysis.
Yeah, we have to be nerds - we have all the Star Wars movies on DVD. Great I'm a ...Expand for more
member of geekdom.
Workplace
The semiconductor industry is an odd industry. I have to wear a "bunny suit" at work - despite what you are picturing it does not have rabbit ears and a leotard with a cute fuzzy tail, it is a suit that covers you from head to toe where just your eyes look out. We have to wear gloves and safety glasses too - it's a very glamorous look that may some day replace mini skirts and high heels. (Did I mention that I spout sarcasm 24/7?) Most bunny suits are white but ours are black they sort of look like ninja costumes. In fact, one time I put my bunny suit on and took a 2 1/2 ft screwdriver and pretended to be a ninja (complete with crazy ninja fighting sounds) with a sword (aka the BF Screwdriver) - everybody i worked with just looked at me like I was crazy. It wasn't pretty. Come to think of it they look at me funny when I call screwdrivers plus and minus instead of phillips and flathead. I know what they're called, but really - it just makes more sense to call them plus and minus, doesn't it?
Anyway I work in a special room to remove contaminants from the air called a cleanroom. We wear the bunny suits to cut down on human contamination (people shed skin cells like crazy, gross eh? dont' even get me started on what kind of stuff comes out of your nose when you sneeze) and if you're going into the cleanroom you're not allowed to wear make up, hair spray or deodorant in the cleanroom - makes getting ready in the morning easy, jump out of bed, toss some clothes on, head out the door. Mostly I work on tools that use pyrophoric gases (they catch on fire if they hit air, no spark needed) to deposit very thin (about 1/100 of a human hair in thickness) layers of silicon on the substrates (also called wafers) used to make computer chips. If you don't know what you're doing or if you violate the safety interlocks on the tools you can blow up the reactors. Sounds dangerous but really it's not. I work with lots of nasty chemicals too, hydrochloric and hydrofluoric acid which are easy to get hurt with. Maybe that's why this industry pays well - stupid people can't do my job without getting hurt. I spend most of my day telling other people what to do and running experiments to make the reactors work better and produce wafers more consistently.
I've decided that work sucks and that it doesn;t matter where I work or how much I get paid, it would be much better to be retired. I've made it my life's goal to win the lottery and retire. So far that's not working out too well for me but I still try.
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